In her autobiography, A New England Girlhood (1889), Lucy Larcom attempts to articulate the aspirations that led her and her fellow “mill-girls” to publish their work in The Lowell Offering; she writes: “we did not set ourselves up to be literary; though we enjoyed the freedom of writing what we pleased and seeing how it looked in print. It was good practice for us, and that was all that we desired.” Reading this explanation is perhaps more confusing than it is enlightening. To begin with, what does it mean to “set [oneself] up to be literary,” and why does Larcom insist that the factory operatives did not do this? Why did “writing what [they] pleased and seeing how it looked in print” give them such satisfaction? Finally, what exactly is print “good practice” for, especially in the case of women who worked for the Lowell textile factories and published in The Lowell Offering between its first appearance in October 1840 and its demise in December 1845?

These women were an integral part of the nineteenth-century American textile industry that flourished throughout New England. With the establishment of the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell and his fellow “Boston Associates” constructed and operated a series of mills throughout Massachusetts. In order to avoid the European practice of employing families in the mills, as well as the employment of male workers who might demand higher wages, the Associates advertised for female employees, usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. While parents were persuaded to send their daughters to the mills by mill owners’ assurances of corporate paternalism and protection, the daughters themselves were drawn by the wages – higher than anything they could earn in other occupations – and the opportunities for independence and self-improvement. Operatives worked for twelve hours a day, but were encouraged to spend their spare time attending evening schools and lyceum lectures and enjoying free access to circulating libraries. The literary interests of the operatives prompted the organization of improvement circles, often held in churches, in which they met to share their work with one another.